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Comment by aluminussoma | Hacker News Reader

I doubt it. The founders the company saw Flickr starve to death after its acquisition. Surely they don't want the same to happen to Slack.

Side thought: I wonder if Flickr could have become what Instagram is today if not for the acquisition!

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Chat apps (even "enterprise" chat apps) are commodities. Here today, gone tomorrow. The same is going to happen to Slack inevitably; an acquisition (or, really, any financial exit) at least get something for the founders.

There are high switching costs.

Once everyone in your 1000+ company is using it, its hard to get them all to switch to another chat product. You got saved conversations, workflows, integrations, etc.

I recently audited our developer integration with slack, it's about 15-20 hooks. We estimated it would take us a few dev weeks max to replace them. The bigger cost is people's preference for a familiar tool and the gnashing of teeth. It's actually their nice webhook design and apis that make it easy to move. And no if you're reading this and know who I am we aren't considering replacing it, chillaxe.

There is no switching costs involved. I am in one of the big corporation who's gone through 5 different chat clients. It could decide overnight that one of them must die and it wouldn't matter.

It's one of the lowest switching costs. A few weeks lost to redo the integrations that really matter. That's about it.

Zero benefit in the end, they're all a basic chat with some fanciness of top. It's just time wasted for all the users who hates change and have to learn a new tool for no benefit.

Do you think Slack or Github has higher switching costs?

Slack for sure. All the employees are going to be pissed off for months and lose a lot of productivity while they learn the new UI.

Git only impacts developers, a smaller user base, who can figure out how to use a new website.

That being said. They are both easy switch. Just need to update the URL to the new tool.

Work in a company with ~100k magnitude of employees that has been through multiple chat and collaboration apps over a decade. There is no switching delays for employees because these are basically deployed as hard cut over. There is pre-switching cost for the company because those integrations are what IT is basically paid to fix as part of cut over.

Agreed. I think tech valuations for single-product start-ups underestimate the competition and risk if substitution. I mean valuations imply too much top line growth and margins on businesses that might see their revenues drop or fail to grow and have poor cash flow. For example: Twitter, Snap. I also know first hand that valuations for urban mobility and real estate tech companies are really wild.

I don't believe Flickr was ever targeting the same audience. There are very few companies which succeeded in the space Flickr was focused on. Smugmug is probably the closest and they wound up buying Flickr from Yahoo!.

Turns out there's not much of a monetizable market for professional and hobbyist photographers to have a portfolio-like social photo service. Or no one's found it yet.

Flickr very early on targeted mobile, and pioneered the concept of a photostream. My first smartphone photo upload to them was June 2005. And my use case was basically what I use Instagram for today: to regularly share interesting photos with friends and family. So I strongly believe that if Flickr had kept its founders involved and continued to innovate, it could have been the dominant social photo application today.

Any company could have pivoted to be Instagram. But Instagram was at the right place at the right time with the right product. Flickr did not have time on their side so it didn't matter if they had the other two.

What I'm saying is that it didn't have to be a pivot. Flickr had the key features and smartphone use cases worked out 5 years before Instagram existed.

The only reason there was a gap in the iPhone market for Instagram to fill was that internal warring at Yahoo kept them from launching a good iPhone app. If Flickr has just taken their existing smartphone features and put them in an iPhone app on iPhone launch day, they would have been the dominant social photo sharing app on the iPhone, just at they were on the web.

"5 years before Instagram existed" ... right place, right product, wrong time.

It’s called Instagram.

Not even close to the core of Flickr users, especially when they were new and growing.

If you read articles by early Instagram team members and users, I think you might be surprised at the overlap in audience and similarities in goals.

“When Richardson joined Instagram in February 2012, at age 26, the former art history major was drawn to what was then a fast-growing indie platform for photographers, hipsters and artistic-types who wanted to share interesting or beautiful things they discovered about the world. At that time, Instagram was “a camera that looked out into the world," said one of the company’s first engineers, "versus a camera that was all about myself, my friends, who I’m with.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/technology/2018/11/14...

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